Cardinal Müller: “Demanding abortion as a human right is unsurpassable in its cynicism”

Editor’s note: This essay was first published in German at kath.net on March 16th, and was translated into English, with the permission of the author, by Frank Nitsche-Robinson.

Vatican (kath.net) The Christian-humanistic conception of man is to be replaced by the atheistic-evolutionistic one. This conception of man represents a dualism according to which the body and the spirit are separate. The body is regarded as a thing, as a legal object, so that man becomes a legal subject only when he has spirit – only then does man become a legal subject who can dispose of rights, especially human rights.

This splitting of man into a legal object and a legal subject has consequences for the human right to life that must be seen as a paradigm shift in the view of a person’s life. It is no longer the human being as such who is protected by law, but only the human spirit, which is manifested in self-reflection and formal self-determination. We want to address this change and illuminate the consequences in the abortion law of “clusters of cells” or “gestational tissue,” as unborn human beings are referred to in the atheistic-evolutionist view of human beings. We asked Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, whom Pope Francis recently called a “master of Catholic teaching,” for comments.

Lothar C. Rilinger: The atheistic-evolutionist conception of man is based on the dualism of body and spirit. Can this conception of man be accepted from a Christian point of view?

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller: The strict dualism of mind as a thinking thing (res cogitans) and the body as an extended thing (res extensa) goes back in this form to the French philosopher René Descartes. He did not understand himself as an atheist at all and even presented an impressive proof for the existence of God, which would result as a necessary idea evident from our self-consciousness.

Only the materialists of the Popular Enlightenment like Baron d’Holbach, Helvetius or La Mettrie reduced man to matter. Man, they argued, was nothing but a machine, to be explained entirely by the laws of mechanics. Or man was only the sum of his social conditions, as Comte and Marx put it, and therefore had first to be created into a new man by improvement.

The atheism of the criticism of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries by Max Stirner and Feuerbach, in connection with Darwinian evolutionism, could no longer recognize in man a difference in essence between animal and man. For Nietzsche, man was the “not yet determined animal” that had developed into the “higher man” only in a few specimens, while the broad masses represented a “surplus of the wayward, the sick, the degenerate, the infirm, the necessarily suffering.” For the “deterioration of the European race” by the “re-evaluation” of the weak to the strong and of contempt for the suffering to compassion for them, Nietzsche – this philosopher of nihilism and herald of the “death of God”, whom the eugenicists and racists of the 20th century rightly or wrongly invoked – blames Christianity in his writing: “Beyond Good and Evil” (cf. § 62). Man was only the intermediate piece between the animal and the coming “superman”, who was so “dear to Nietzsche’s heart”.

The current transhumanism or posthumanism follows the siren song of its prophet gone-mad: “Well! Take heart, you higher men!” as he exclaimed, “Only now does the mountain of the human future begin to work. God has died: Now we desire that the Superman live!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part IV. The Higher Man, 2, [Leipzig 1923], 418). Herein the globalist elite of today feels addressed, indulging itself in all privileges, and prescribing to the dull masses of billions, which Nietzsche called the “rabble”, the horse cure of self-decimation and to the rest of humanity the happiness of grazing cows (cf. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative. For a Better Future, 2022). “But whereas equality before God was one that spurred effort, the equality of the ‘last men’ is one of notorious comfort, because there is nothing left worthy of effort, nor is there anyone left to claim it.” (Herfried Münkler, Marx – Wagner – Nietzsche. Welt im Umbruch, Berlin 2021, 222).

Precisely here is the fault line between the conception of man as the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 8:6; Romans 8:29) and the naturalistic reduction of man to the accidental product of evolution, sociology, and genetically enriched man as a future hybrid of biological organism and artificial intelligence, the homunculus or cyborg. For us, the revealed truth about man applies: “Because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21).

Rilinger: Is it ethically justifiable to call a creature of God, as which an unborn child, too, is regarded, a “matter” or “thing”, which after all is to be veiled by the qualification as a “heap of cells” or “pregnancy tissue”, obviously in order to not let the full truth be revealed to the population?

Card. Müller: Every human being owes himself in his real physical existence to being begotten and conceived by his father and his mother. The parents do not produce a tissue which would then accidentally carry out a kind of transformation into a human existence. From the beginning of conception, every human being possesses a distinctive DNA as the physical basis of his personal identity. Every human being, as a person of spiritual-bodily nature, is from eternity willed, loved and destined by God for salvific communion with Him without end; “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren.” (Romans 8:29)

Rilinger: Pregnancy is obviously seen as a disease in the new conception of man, the term “reproductive health” as a synonym for abortion cannot be interpreted otherwise. Can pregnancy be regarded as a disease and therefore abortion as restoration of health?

Card. Müller: Pregnancy is nothing else than the bodily symbiosis of the child begotten by a man with the woman who is and will remain his mother until death. Pregnancy offers the child the cradle of life and its growth until the day when the child sees the light of day in birth. Illness, on the other hand, means the restriction and the threat to life, bodily functions or mental and spiritual integrity. Procreation of a child, pregnancy, birth, care of the infant, its being nourished with the mother’s milk, the mother’s kisses and tears, the care for the healthy growth of the child are anything but a malfunction that calls into question the functioning of a technical “product”.

The procreation of a new human being in the womb is not a reproduction of an object of pleasure or an object of use, but a participation of the parents in God’s plan of creation and salvation. Jesus, the Son of God, made children come to Him to bless them and to commend them to us in their simplicity and incorruptness as the model of our sonship with God. (Mt 18, 1-4). He is thus the archetype of God’s kindness towards children. He gives us food for thought when he says: “When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.” (John 16:21).

Rilinger: Since sexuality is often detached from the procreation of a human being and thus serves personal gain of pleasure rather than the continuation of society, pregnancy is sometimes seen as an impairment of pleasure. Could this impairment be regarded as a disease?

Card. Müller: Not every sexual union of man and woman leads to pregnancy. But it must also not be fundamentally separated from it in order to “use” the mere sexual pleasure – without personal love – as a drug against the experience of the meaninglessness of existence or as a mortification or increase of self-esteem.

Marriage is a holistic unity of man and woman in love that takes the two partners beyond themselves in the experience of God’s unconditional love, which is our eternal happiness. “The conjugal act is sometimes meritorious and without any mortal or venial sin, as when it is directed to the good of procreation and education of a child for the worship of God” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Ch. 7), even if effectively – without the exclusionary intention of the parents – no new human being comes into being.

Rilinger: In the new conception of man, the unborn human being is regarded as a thing. Is this legal qualification of an unborn human being as a thing intended to achieve the possibility of being allowed to kill the unborn up to the last logical second of pregnancy, without there being a homicide offense?

Card. Müller: A thing is an inanimate being like a book, a car, a computer. But a human being in the embryonic state of his development is a living being with the human organs that enable him to think and act in a truly human way.

A woman also does not give birth to a thing, but to a child, which she hopes to be able to take into her arms healthy and alive.

An argumentation against this inhuman way of thinking towards a child in the womb is superfluous, because the being human of the child in the womb is evident and its denial is the justification of the most heinous crime against life. To declare a child in the womb to be a thing is just as perverse as making people slaves and then declaring them to be things in order to justify this horrendous crime against humanity.

Rilinger: The European Parliament adopted the so-called Matic Report in the summer of 2021, according to which abortion should be considered a human right. Can you imagine that the refusal to observe this newly invented so-called human right will have civil or criminal consequences?

Card. Müller: When these neo-pagan atheists and agnostics speak of human rights and European values, they grudgingly admit that there are ethical standards.

Even if, in their metaphysical disorientation resulting from the loss of faith in the almighty God, our Creator and incorruptible judge of good and evil deeds, they reject objective and universally binding moral norms, they must, however, at least acknowledge as an ethical minimum the limit of self-determination in the body and life of the other human being.

Whoever thinks that the powerful, the healthy and the rich have more right to life than the weak, the sick and the poor, convicts himself as a disciple of social Darwinism, which led to millions of victims of political ideologies in the 20th century. It is not enough to invoke one’s anti-fascism and anti-Stalinism, one must rather renounce their inhuman principles in thought and action. In spite of all appeals to the emancipation from the Decalogue or appeals to the majority decision in parliaments or the changed feeling of the people, the natural moral law shining forth in the reason and in the conscience of every human being is valid. Those who are so criminally frivolous with the lives of others scream the loudest when – as can be seen in the war crimes trials – they themselves get it in the neck.

The Second Vatican Council, in the conciliar decree Gaudium et Spes, called for respect for the human person, saying, “everyone must consider his every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all His life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus. In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord, ‘As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me’ (Matt. 25:40).”

It goes on to state: “Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, 27)

Rilinger: May – as is demanded in the new conception of man – a doctor be forbidden to refuse to kill an unborn human being against his moral conscience?

Card. Müller: To force a person to act against his conscience is already immoral in itself. To punish him for this is the sure sign of a perversion of justice in a totalitarian derailed polity, which has lost its claim to the rule of law, even if it would still formally present the appearance of a democracy.

Rilinger: Can a doctor’s refusal to perform a prenatal killing be regarded as a “gender-specific violence against women” as called for in the atheistic-evolutionist conception of man?

Card. Müller: Abortion is a gender-specific violence against a woman as a mother and her daughter or son.

Rilinger: Is it compatible with our legal system that every hospital, including a Catholic hospital, must perform abortions?

Card. Müller: One cannot arbitrarily-positivistically declare to be right what is ethically wrong.

Rilinger: In the case of pregnancy, human rights of the mother and the unborn child can collide if the life of the mother is endangered by the pregnancy. In this case, must a balancing of interests be carried out, so that the physician must decide between the life of the mother and that of the unborn child?

Card. Müller: No doctor has any right at all to dispose of the life and death of another human being. Rather, his task is to save lives. In an extreme case, when only one life can be saved at the expense of another life, no one can decide from the outside. Here begins the logic of greater love, as in “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13). I know women who were willing to sacrifice their life for their child in this hour, who died in the process, and others who survived despite doctors’ predictions to the contrary, and who today thank God for this grace.

Rilinger: Abortions for whatever reason are to be included in the benefits catalogue by health insurance companies and health insurers. Can the community of the insured be expected to pay for abortions that are not medically indicated and are, in fact, general contraception in character?

Card. Müller: From the point of view of the natural moral law and the Christian conception of man, compulsory participation in every form of abortion, euthanasia and other forms of elimination of allegedly “life no longer worth living” is to be rejected with all emphasis and on every condition. It is, of course, a fact that in totalitarian dictatorships and also in states in the “democratic West” certain ideological groups – right up to the parties represented in parliament – coerce fellow citizens into financial cooperation in the killing of innocent people. Christians are often publicly defamed, discriminated against and even prosecuted for this.

Rilinger: The Matic report does not have any legal consequences, since the European Parliament has no legislative competence for abortion law. Nevertheless, this report has an impact in the political discourse. Is this decision intended to show what we should regard as European values, so that, as President Macron has already demanded, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights must be amended?

Card. Müller: To demand abortion as a human right cannot be surpassed in its inhuman cynicism. This is what Pope Francis will say to the French president, who publicly claims to be his friend.

Rilinger: Your Eminence, thank you very much!